Friday 15 October 2021
2:00pm – 3:00pm

The US Withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Changing Global Power Balance

This event will start at 2pm BST

Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation

The withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan has altered Asia’s geopolitical map, with potential implications for global power relations with actors like China and Russia. The US is expected to focus more attention on the Indo-Pacific region in years to come, intensifying a potential confrontation with China and increasing the concerns of the international community. How could this affect Japan? In this webinar chaired by Gideon Rachman, the panellists discussed the implications of the Afghanistan fiasco for geopolitics more broadly, including Japan-US-China relations, and the implications in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.

A short summary of the event can be found via this link, located on the Foundation’s Facebook page.

A video of the event can be watched below:

About the contributors

Gideon Rachman

Gideon Rachman (chair) is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. He writes a weekly column for the FT and hosts an international-affairs podcast. His main interests include geopolitics in Asia, US foreign policy and the future of the EU. Rachman has won the Orwell Prize for journalism (2016) and was also named commentator of the year in the European Press Prize awards in 2016. He has written two books on international politics – Zero-Sum World (2011) and Easternisation (2016). He is also a regular public speaker, appearing before both academic and business audiences.

Dr Michael Auslin

Dr Michael Auslin, a historian and geopolitical analyst, is the inaugural Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The best-selling author of four non-fiction books, he is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his writing appears in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Politico, and National Review, among other leading publications. Formerly an Associate Professor of History at Yale, he was a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Fulbright Scholar, among other awards. He appears frequently in US and foreign media, and is Vice Chairman of the Wilton Park USA Foundation.

Dr Yasushi Watanabe

Dr Yasushi Watanabe is Professor of Public Diplomacy and American Studies at the Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University. Before joining Keio University, he was awarded a PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University, and undertook post-doctoral research at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He was a Fellow at Downing College, Cambridge in 2007, a Visiting Professor at Sciences-Po in 2013, a Japan Scholar at the Wilson Center, and a Visiting Scholar at Peking University and the College of Europe in 2018. His books include the co-edited volume Soft Power Superpowers: Cultural and National Assets of Japan and the United States (2008) and the edited volume Handbook of Cultural Security (2018).

Dr Yu Jie

Dr Yu Jie is Senior Research Fellow on China in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, focusing on the decision-making processes of Chinese foreign policy as well as China’s economic diplomacy. She speaks and writes frequently for major media outlets such as the BBC and Financial Times; and regularly briefs senior policy practitioners from G7 member governments, the UK Cabinet Office and the Silk Road Fund in Beijing, as well as FTSE 100 companies. Yu Jie has testified at the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and International Trade Committee, and was also head of China Foresight at LSE IDEAS.